The Authoritarians: Their Assault on Individual Liberty, the Constitution, and Free Enterprise from the 19th Century to the Present

By Jonathan W. Emord, Dan Burton and John Doolittle

The untold story of how Authoritarians from the Progressive Era to the present removed all constitutional barriers to the deprivation of individual rights, upending the promise of the Declaration of Independence and inviting a new socialist state in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781631953934

Jonathan W. Emord

Jonathan W. Emord is a constitutional and administrative lawyer who has appeared before the federal courts and agencies for 35 years. He is the only attorney in American history to have defeated the FDA eight times in federal court. He served as an attorney in the FCC during the Reagan Administration and as a Vice President at the Cato Institute. Jonathan is the author of numerous published works and books, including Freedom, Technology, and the First Amendment, The Rise of Tyranny, Global Censorship of Health Information, and Restore the Republic which are all critically acclaimed. Former Congressman Ron Paul calls Jonathan “an expert in constitutional theory and history” and “an expert litigator with a long string of legal victories over the federal bureaucracy” (from Ron Paul’s Foreword to Restore the Republic). Jonathan is a columnist for U.S.A. Today Magazine and has appeared on several national programs, including the Stossel Show (Fox Business Channel), McCuistion (PBS), and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, and in several documentaries.

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INTRODUCTION

Who are authoritarians? They are people who believe in submission to a governing will imposed at the expense of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. They are paternalists. Some demand pure democracy or majority rule at the expense of minority rights. Some demand rule by elites, called experts, who operate through bureaucracy to regulate enterprise. Some demand government take-over of private property and elimination of private worship and political dissent. Beginning in May of 2020, thousands of far-left authoritarian radicals committed crimes against life and property across the United States, including vandalism, robbery, arson, assault, and murder. Those authoritarian radicals received vocal support from the mainstream media, liberal politicians, and Big Tech companies, among others who either endorsed or condoned their actions and did not condemn them. On January 6, 2021 as Congress began to consider certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2021 Electoral College, hundreds of authoritarian reactionaries including anarchists, nihilists, QAnon zealots, and others with no respect for the rule of law breached Capitol security and occupied the Capitol buildings, destroying property and entering the private confines of the Senate and House chambers. Those authoritarian reactionaries were universally condemned by the mainstream media, by virtually all politicians, and by Big Tech companies. The authoritarian reactionaries were part of a well-orchestrated, armed vanguard that planned in advance to overwhelm capitol defenses simultaneously from different points of vulnerability. Their assault on the Citadel of Democracy was a pre-planned domestic terrorist attack. Vehicles filled with weapons caches were found on capitol streets. After the riot subsided pipe bombs were found strategically placed around the Capitol and at Democratic and Republican offices.

Whether they call themselves progressives, socialists, or communists, anarchists, nihilists, or anti-capitalists, they share an opposition to the fundamental tenets of constitutional government: They do not believe all are created equal and endowed by God with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property; they do not believe that the very purpose of government is to secure rights; and they do not believe governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Since the mid-1800s, authoritarians have justified the taking of life, liberty, and property as necessary to achieve a so-called common good. That common good is invariably a reflection of their own moral outrage and interests in furtherance of personal quests for political power and control. It is born of a belief that those in power know better than the typical person what is in that person’s self-interest.

To gain popular support for the confiscation of private wealth through taxation and political control, they stoke the public into class warfare. They endeavor to make employees turn on employers, and low and middle-income earners on the wealthy. As a prelude to confiscation, they villainize private wealth and call for soaking the rich, whereby they can pillage through confiscatory taxation and then parcel out the spoils, enriching themselves and favored constituencies in the process, in a feeding frenzy of legalized looting and self-dealing. Calls for class warfare invariably lead to acts of violence, such as looting, arson, anarchy, terrorism, and treason.

As they draw ever more wealth out of the economy, they destroy the engine of economic growth, the ability of entrepreneurs to provide employment and opportunity, innovate, and uplift the standard of living. And while they condemn wealth, they themselves obtain unimaginable riches, living lavishly and turning their political offices into vehicles for private gain through influence peddling.

By deceiving the public with a false allure (e.g., the promise of things of great value for nothing: free health care, free education, or a free guaranteed minimum income), far-left authoritarians have succeeded in obtaining popular support for breaking down legal barriers that defend individual liberty and property, indeed all constitutional barriers that stand in the way of total government control. Because authoritarians have ordinarily operated in the shadows (in academia, executive branch advisory roles, and the bureaucracy), their threat to liberty and property has been until recently invisible to most Americans. But in recent years, after decades of eroding constitutional barriers, they have now become bold, public, vocal, insistent, and violent. They no longer shy away from the moniker socialist. They embrace it. They no longer leave it to the bureaucracy to undermine free enterprise. They lead the battle against private wealth. They no longer feign respect for the rule of law. They violate it with impunity and a sense of moral superiority based not on persuasion but on brute force.

Authoritarians have succeeded repeatedly in overcoming obstacles to unlimited government. They have overcome every defense of individual liberty except one: the commitment of an American majority against mob action that destroys or steals property, causes physical injury, or compels allegiance to causes Americans oppose. That powerful counterforce, fueled by generations who have a deep and abiding commitment to liberty, forms a uniquely American strength against authoritarianism and the greatest prospect for restoration of constitutional government.

Today we are witnessing a national uprising even greater than the war protests of the 1960s and the series of anarchistic attacks that caused such horror and damage during the economic contraction known as the Panic of 1907. Egged on by sympathizers within the Democratic Party who either welcome a coup d’état in America or who remain silent in the face of one, the Marxists rioting in the streets have powerful allies. They have become a political and paramilitary force with which to be reckoned. What started as an isolated urban phenomenon of orchestrated chaos has reached suburbia and even otherwise banal settings, such as restaurants. Those who love liberty can no longer perceive the threat as distant. It is omnipresent, and it imperils American lives, liberty, and property, the rule of law and the constitutional Republic itself.

AUTHORITARIAN EFFORTS TO DESTROY THE REPUBLIC, RELIGION, AND FREE ENTERPRISE

Under the cover of protests arising from isolated instances of police brutality involving black victims, Marxists, anti-capitalists, and anarchists have engaged in violent insurrection, turning cities into places of mayhem and conflagration as they seek to trigger a Marxist revolution. Destruction of civil society, installation of prosecutors who will not defend the people from crime, elimination of cash bail, and the neutering and defunding of police are not coincidental or isolated events. They are planned steps to bring about a violent overthrow of American governments. The revolutionaries aim to install Marxist regimes, which they will control, bringing an end to the greatest bastion in defense of individual liberty the world has ever known, the constitutional republic of the United States.

It is false that racism is non-existent in America, but it is also false that racism is common in our society or in policing; rather, racism is the exception, not the rule, and ordinarily when it arises, it comes under siege from every part of our society. Despite those facts, isolated instances of racism have given rise to a popular lie (lies being the currency of Marxist revolutionaries): that every police officer is racist; that, indeed, all American governments and businesses are inherently, irredeemably, systemically racist; and that every person who lacks dark pigment is inherently racist. If those falsehoods are accepted, then logic dictates an end to government and business, a redistribution or destruction of private property, and a rearrangement of society based on skin color. It is a perfect Bolshevik recipe for government overthrow.

Under this perverse theory, all institutions must be destroyed because they are, every one of them, guilty of a wrong by their simple existence. In their place, the Marxists demand a new regime that owns and distributes all property and polices all speech, indeed all human behavior. The BLM organization and Antifa build their support for a Marxist takeover by fueling popular sentiment against racism; channeling that sentiment into race-based hatred, character assassination, and scapegoating; and directing popular animus against obstacles in the way of their total control: the police, property owners, and government.

Since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, scapegoating to provoke violence (pitting an alleged Oppressed against their alleged Oppressors); the felling of symbols of all prior governmental regimes, history, and institutions, such as the church; the looting and destruction of private property; the occupation of cities to the exclusion of law enforcement; the assault and murder of police; and the assault and murder of innocents—have all been hallmarks of communist revolution. Each instance, whether to create or to perpetuate a communist state, has been accompanied by gruesome violence, torture, gulag or concentration camps, forced slave labor, and forced migrations that sacrifice millions to starvation and death. These movements depend on hate, directed against class, race, and private wealth. They mean to tear everything down and replace it with a totalitarian government that they rule. They mean to enslave us all.

The Bolshevik Red Terror in Russia killed approximately two million people between 1917 and 1922. Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror killed about 23.2 million between 1930 and 1938 in the former Soviet Union. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1959 to 1961) and Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) killed a combined sixty million people in China. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed approximately two million people between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia. North Korea’s communist dictatorship has killed an estimated 3.2 million people. Rudolph J. Rummel estimates communist governments worldwide have killed approximately 148 million between 1900 and 1999.¹ The Victims of Communism Foundation conservatively estimates at least 100 million have been killed by communist regimes worldwide. The Black Book of Communism puts that figure at between eighty-five million and 100 million, explaining, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history.² By comparison, in all of World War II, 291,557 Americans died in battle between 1941 and 1945. Quite obviously, the most extensive destruction of human life on the planet has come not from natural disasters or wars but from communism and socialism.

In the United States, the Marxist riots have arisen in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic, which has left streets and businesses largely void of pedestrian traffic, and largely undefended. The rioters are well organized and well-funded by sympathetic industry and individuals, the funds of which finance weapons from bricks to improvised explosive devices strategically hidden in street caches for later retrieval by the rioters. The rioting is aimed not only at provoking the police and destroying property but also at intimidating citizens into inaction and bending weak political leaders into anemic defenses, no defense at all, or complicity with Marxist demands. These are precisely the kind of methods used in communist coups worldwide. The tactics are the same as those used to install communist regimes in Russia, China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Albania, Cuba, Angola, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, to name a few.

The rioting, vandalism, looting, arson, assaults, rapes, and murders have been unleashed by diverse groups variously describing themselves as Marxists, socialists, anti-capitalists, and anarchists, all sharing a profound hatred of the United States, its Constitution, its history, and its free-market economy and all sharing a zealous commitment to authoritarianism. Austin, Oakland, Aurora, Omaha, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Raleigh, Louisville, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Manassas, Williamsburg, Richmond, Charlotte, Bakersfield, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Des Moines, Denver, Detroit, Kenosha, Madison, Green Bay, Houston, Memphis, Kansas City, Phoenix, Portland, Olympia, Sacramento, San Jose, Seattle, New York City, Rochester, Cincinnati, and Dayton are among the cities that have suffered violent attacks, a major uptick in homicides, assaults, and rapes, and billions of dollars in property damage.

Over 200 people have been killed by rioters as of this writing (including infants, youth, and police). Thousands have been injured. Billions of dollars have been lost from vandalism, arson, and looting. Most of the killed and injured have been minorities. Over 1,000 police and 200 federal government agents have been injured. Over 6,500 people have been arrested. Most admit affiliation with the Black Lives Matter organization, Antifa, or similar Marxist, socialist, anti-capitalist, or anarchist groups. The FBI has initiated over 500 domestic terror investigations. Attorney General William Barr announced Operation Legend in July 2020, a federal law enforcement initiative to combat rioters and criminal syndicalists named after four-year-old Legend Talifero who was shot and killed while sleeping in his bed during rioting in Kansas City on June 29, 2020. Operation Legend has made a total of over 2,000 federal criminal arrests in Kansas City, Chicago, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Memphis, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Of those, 150 have been charged with murder. The arrests have also netted over 500 guns and seven kilos of fentanyl.

Ordered reductions in police patrols in urban areas across the United States and the imposition of new laws that free criminals, eliminate cash bail, prevent police from using the force necessary to stem riots and make arrests, eliminate qualified immunity for police, eliminate plainclothes (undercover) police, and eliminate police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units have dramatically increased the carnage and misery suffered by residents who dwell in major American cities. Morale among law enforcement officers is at an all-time low. Many police have filed for early retirement, are taking extended leaves of absence, and are calling in sick in atypically high numbers. Police recruitment efforts have been severely hampered by the vilification of law enforcement and by the lack of support for police by political leaders.

Dedicated to the dismantlement of law enforcement and the transformation of the United States into a socialist country, socialist billionaire George Soros, via his Justice & Public Safety PAC, among others, has paid over $2 billion in campaign contributions to replace law and order county, state’s, and district attorneys in San Francisco, California; Contra Costa County,

California; Fairfax County, Virginia; Arlington County, Virginia; Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Suffolk County, Massachusetts; St. Louis, Missouri; Cook County, Illinois; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Multnomah County, Oregon with socialists. These new socialist anti-law enforcement officials have refused to prosecute those accused of misdemeanors, certain felonies, and attacks on police, have given early release to depopulate jails, have expanded the scope of investigations and prosecutions against the police, and have fired assistant district attorneys with distinguished careers enforcing the law. In short, Soros-backed county, states, and district attorneys are destroying the rule of law in America and breaking down all barriers to the violent overthrow of the government. They are dismantling the essential governmental defenses against a Marxist revolution. They are laying a foundation for the end of the republican form of government and rights to private property and liberty.

Since the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ vision of a workers’ revolt against the bourgeoisie capitalist has led to violent installations of totalitarian regimes, which then turn their murderous rampages against the very people who supported, or, at least, did not oppose the revolutions. While proclaimed the natural evolution of capitalism, the proletarian revolt is never actually serendipitous but is always provoked by Marxist organizers, as they are doing in the United States presently.

In rapid succession, newly installed communist leaders once in power use force to suppress revolution and kill the opposition, demanding absolute allegiance to the state and absolute control over all aspects of life. Those regimes engender hatred for the propertied classes, confiscate private property, incarcerate or murder the former property owners, and indoctrinate the masses in the new order, insisting that all reveal publicly their support and suffer arrest and punishment for any dissent, which is said to be treason. In this way, the entire population is converted into slavery.

The common Marxist method is to force dissenters to suffer public humiliation, torture, and even death. In Marxist regimes, the common exemplars of freedom are condemned, including those of conscience (such as the media, schools, and churches). Many formerly free institutions of communication, learning, and worship are required to serve as organs of the state, to ensure one uniform propaganda message. All media, art, and literature are controlled by the state. Institutions that teach youth rewrite history to condemn the non-Marxist past and to glorify, unceasingly, the Marxist state and its leaders. The people are denied the right to practice their religions and are threatened with arrest, incarceration, or death for professing allegiance to God rather than the state. Violent Marxist condemnation of religion reminds Christians and Jews of the persecution of Jews in Pharaoh’s Egypt and reminds Christians also of the persecution of the disciples of Christ by secular Roman authorities in the first century following Christ’s crucifixion (and of the exile, murder, and crucifixion of Christ’s apostles by Roman imperial decree). The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness, wrote the atheist Marx. Thus, for example, Cuba’s Fidel Castro struggled mightily to destroy the Catholic faith of his people, incarcerating and killing many, albeit so strong was the church among the nation’s people that the faithful remain.

All Americans are witnessing Marxists’ repressive tactics in the streets of our cities and suburbs. Most media, Big Tech, and major universities have created an environment hospitable to Marxist ideology and cancel culture, an environment that invites personal attacks on all who celebrate American history, culture, and law, demanding instead that there be no debate and that only one view be tolerated (indeed, celebrated), that of condemnation of American history, government, business, and culture. That anti-Americanism is often taught as the only viewpoint acceptable even in grade schools, both public and private. That anti-Americanism underlay Joe Biden’s executive order to abolish the 1776 Commission as a true historical retort to the critical race theory of the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

For example, variously in reliance on the New York Times’ 1619 Project (under the direction of Times’ reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones), many American youth are being taught that the United States did not arise out of the great promise of the 1776 Declaration of Independence (that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights) but out of a society of white supremacists, a slave-owning aristocracy of whites in the 1619 Jamestown colony, which white supremacy is said to infect every white person ever since, every institution of government, and every business in America.

The project neglects to tell the truth about the Jamestown colony. Its leaders first tried a form of what today we call Marxism (common ownership and equal distribution of the harvest), resulting in widespread starvation and death. That error was corrected thereafter by the introduction of what today we call capitalism, allowing the settlers to obtain their own land and retain their own harvests, resulting in self-sustaining abundance. They thus rejected Marxism and adopted free enterprise, transforming the colony from near extinction to prosperity. The 1619 Project also maintains a false narrative regarding the color of slaves in the Jamestown colony. As explained in Chapter 11, four months before twenty black slaves arrived in Jamestown, one hundred white slaves arrived and toiled under the same conditions as the later black arrivals. Moreover, from 1619 until at least the American Revolution, white and black slaves existed not only in Jamestown but also throughout the colonies, laboring in bondage side by side.

In short, the true quest for freedom that defines America’s unending struggle from its founding in the American Revolution through the Civil War and on through the Civil Rights era to the present, in defending and expanding the blessings of liberty to embracing all regardless of race and gender, has been erased in our schools and replaced with a false narrative that defines America as hopelessly racist, replete with unending white patriarchal dominance, racial and cultural insensitivities, and white privilege. This false propaganda is designed to prepare America’s youth for dismantlement of American government and capitalism in favor of collectivism, i.e., socialism. Those who propound the false teachings are indoctrinating American youth to hate their own country so that its foundational principles in defense of liberty and free enterprise may be destroyed and its Constitution overturned.

The BLM organization and Antifa promote this essential thesis, denouncing white privilege, describing it as an inextricable characteristic of all white people in America, baked into their DNA, and of all American institutions. In BLM organization and Antifa circles, there is no such thing as black racism, only white racism (hence, while BLM and Antifa are married to the label, black lives matter, they condemn the fundamental truth that all lives matter). Non-whites who favor individual liberty and free enterprise (the overwhelming majority) are labeled as not truly black. Under this illogic, you must be a Marxist to be black, and there is no such thing as a black capitalist.

When one comes to the realization that the BLM organization and Antifa are fundamentally Marxist, it then comes as no surprise that Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, a self-avowed Marxist, complements BLM calls for the toppling of statues to famous Americans, including George Washington, with calls for the destruction of all Christian statues and symbols. Marx, of course, was an atheist and believed religion the opiate of the masses, i.e., a harmful delusion.

King calls Christian symbols, especially those of Christ, tools of oppression and racist propaganda. As with all enemies identified by the BLM organization, the Christian subjects of Shaun King’s vitriol are all labeled racist, a particularly ill-fitting charge when levied against Jesus Christ, the savior of the entire world, who repeatedly professed himself to be no respecter of persons (meaning that he did not discriminate among people), received and ministered to all victims of discriminatory mistreatment throughout his mortal ministry, and preached a doctrine of love and inclusion of all, defining every person without exception to be in the image of God. Indeed, in no small measure, one of the reasons given by the Pharisees for Christ’s crucifixion was that he did not discriminate among people but broke bread with the faithful and sinners alike, violating the Pharisees’ segregationist table customs, which demanded that those deemed holy among the Jews and, thus, clean, not dine or fraternize with any who were deemed unholy or unclean, which included famously the Samaritans and common sinners, and indeed all outside the Pharisees’ tight-knit religious circle.

True Christians are thus not racists because they adhere to Christ’s example of non-discrimination. Rather, Christians view racism as sinful and contrary to Christ’s teachings. Shaun King thus reveals the insincerity of the BLM mantra by condemning true Christians and their art in sacred remembrance of Christ.

While condemning Christianity as white supremacy, King aligns himself with bigots throughout history who have persecuted the faithful. Shifting focus away from Christ’s doctrine of inclusion to a supposed white tone of Christ in statues and stained glass windows, Shaun King proclaims the statues and windows exemplars of white hatred for blacks, demands that they all be destroyed, and encourages an assault on churches and Christianity all over America, writing: I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should . . . come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.³ It does not matter to him that those of all races and ethnicities venerate these images and statues and look to them as reminders of the deep, powerful, and abiding doctrines of Christ which transcend all peoples and reject superficial distinctions (such as pigment). As the logic follows, if the statues venerated by Christians are forms of white supremacy and must come down, then those who venerate them are irredeemably racist and must be condemned. King thus pits his pedestrian demagoguery of hate and violence based on race, which only begets bigotry and intolerance, against the teachings of love, non-violence, and inclusion that have led to the greatest erosion of racial barriers and expansion of civil liberties in the history of the world, from Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, to Martin Luther King, Jr., the father of non-violent civil rights protest.

Heeding Shaun King’s call, BLM and Antifa rioters have torched American churches and toppled religious statues in cities nationwide. The beautiful 250-year-old San Gabriel Mission Church outside of Los Angeles, founded by Saint Junípero Serra in the eighteenth century, was set ablaze and gutted. The iconic exterior of the eighty-three-year-old Our Lady of Mt. Lebanon, Maronite Catholic Church in Los Angeles, was defaced. The Baba Sale Synagogue of Moroccan Jewish Refugees in Los Angeles was vandalized. The Congregation Beth Israel of Los Angeles was defaced with profane graffiti. Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Los Angeles were looted, defaced, and vandalized, including Beit Medrash Kehilat Yaakov; the Synagogue of Rabbi Gershan Best; the Congregation of Tiferes Tzvi; and Young Israel of Hancock Park. Jewish religious schools in the city were also vandalized. Statues of St. Junípero Serra throughout California have been destroyed by BLM supporters. In Ocala, Florida, a man drove a van through the front doors of the Queen of Peace Catholic Church, coming to a stop in the lobby, while parishioners prayed inside the chapel. Exiting the vehicle, he poured gasoline in the lobby and lit the gas on fire. Statues of Our Lady (Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus) were torched and vandalized in Boston and New York. The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver was defaced by BLM rioters in the church and rectory. They left behind the spray-painted words God is dead and there is no God. The iconic doors to the rectory were permanently damaged and the cathedral windows were smashed. The exterior of the 142-year-old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was defaced with BLM graffiti and profanity. The basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, a block away from the White House, was set ablaze in its basement and adjacent building. Since its construction in 1816, every sitting president has attended that church at least once, beginning with James Madison. In Minneapolis, BLM rioters burned part of the interior of the Catholic Basilica of St. Mary, one of the oldest Catholic churches in the United States. BLM rioters firebombed the one-hundred-year-old Lewis Street Church of Christ in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the resulting blaze destroyed the roof of the church. BLM rioters assaulted Catholics praying for peace and unity in front of the St. Louis statue in St. Louis, Missouri, beating, among others, an elderly man who walked with a cane. Father Stephen Schumacher bravely stood in front of the statue and defended it, explaining to the rioters, that St. Louis (King Louis IX) aided the poor and needy. BLM rioters smashed the windows of the 116-year-old Beth Ahabah Reform Jewish Congregation in Richmond, Virginia. BLM rioters defaced the 175-year-old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and smashed the rectory windows of The Cathedral of the Assumption, the third oldest Catholic cathedral in the United States. They also broke the windows of the West Broad Church of Christ in Richmond, which serves an African-American congregation. The St. Jude Chapel in Richmond had its windows smashed.

Those who have instigated, participated in, or supported the violence, vandalism, and arson include the Black Lives Matter and Antifa organizations and their affiliates. The title Black Lives Matter is a deceptively innocuous one that engenders sympathy from almost all people, many of whom choose to protest peacefully, but gives cover to those who have looted and destroyed even black-owned businesses, assaulted and murdered black policemen and black Americans, including even infants, and destroyed public property, including monuments to the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln; to the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg; to the President who refused dictatorship, George Washington; to the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson; and to the first major black proponent of black freedom and equality and women’s suffrage in America, Frederick Douglass. The BLM organization has conspicuously refused to show any sympathy for black victims of the rioting it instigates or the mayhem, assaults, and murders its police defunding and elimination of cash bail policies predictably cause. Indeed, it is precisely because the BLM organization and Antifa seek the Marxist overthrow of the United States that to them, black lives ultimately do not matter; rather, black lives have become acceptable casualties of a Marxist revolutionary struggle to topple American governments.

Antifa, short for Anti-fascist, is another deceptive title, suggesting opposition to fascism. Attaching the epithet fascist to capitalists is an old Leninist saw, ironic because fascism, or state socialism, is nascent communism (the very thing Antifa supports) and is the antithesis of capitalism. Ironic today, as well, because many Antifa members dress in fascist attire, cloak themselves in paramilitary wear, and don black helmets with face shields, indicative of the paramilitary troops who imposed fascism in the 1930s. Like the fascists of the pre-World War II era, Antifa is entirely intolerant of any view but their own Marxism. While self-proclaimed Anti-fascist, they are virtually indistinguishable from fascists.

Antifa and BLM members toss bricks, bottles, Molotov cocktails, improvised explosive devices, bags and bottles filled with frozen water, human feces or urine; they wield brass knuckles, knives, bats, and boards with nails protruding from them; they attack police; set fire to police vehicles; loot, vandalize, and burn businesses and government buildings; and they attack all who voice opinions contrary to their own. In A Brief History of Antifa: Part I, the Gatestone Institute’s Soeren Kern explains, Antifa is . . .[a] highly networked, well-funded organization that has a global presence. Its stated long-term objective, both in America and abroad, is to establish a communist world order. It intends to achieve communist overthrow by employing extreme violence and destruction of public and private property to goad the police into a reaction, which then ‘proves’ Antifa’s claim that the government is ‘fascist.’⁴

Others, opportunists, have joined in the riots, including radical Islamists, white supremacists, anarchists, arsonists, and thieves (with no apparent ideological agenda). Attorney General William Barr has explained that BLM, Antifa, and anarchist rioters carefully plan the hijacking of peaceful protests. They blend into the protests and use protestors as shields to cover their criminal actions.

Founders and leaders of BLM and Antifa have publicly and repeatedly declared themselves to be Marxists. BLM Co-Founder, Patrisse Cullors, was interviewed in 2015 by Jared Ball. In that interview, she, in reference to herself, to her fellow BLM co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, and to BLM organizers in general, said: We are trained Marxists. She explained that she, Garza, and Tometi formed the organization in 2013, following the shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.⁵ Cullors is an understudy of Eric Mann, a leader of the Weather Underground. In 1969, the FBI classified the Weather Underground as a domestic terror organization. In that same year, Mann was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder in association with the firing of two bullets into the Cambridge, Massachusetts police headquarters on November 8, 1969. In that same year, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for assault, battery, disturbing the peace, damaging public property, defacing a building, and disturbing a public assembly.

Consistent with Marxism, BLM and Antifa leaders applaud violence used to exclude and condemn those who do not follow their dictates in lockstep. Theirs is a doctrine of hate that demands complete obedience. They hate free speech, except their own. They hate free enterprise and wish to confiscate private property for their own use. They hate the police and want to abolish them. They hate American history and want to cancel it. They find no hypocrisy in condemning anti-black racism while advocating anti-white racism. They favor restructuring society into governing and subservient classes defined by race. They hate all governments in the United States, which they describe as systemically racist; they want to replace those governments with Marxist states that preside over a socialist economy. They want to replace the free market with government ownership, operation, and control of all private property and means of production. They want to redistribute income from those who earn it to those who do not. They want a guaranteed minimum income. They want reparations for all black Americans based on the assumption that whites alive today are responsible for acts of enslavement by whites over one hundred and fifty-five years ago. They ignore the fact that whites were also enslaved in the colonies, and that manumitted blacks were also slaveowners. They demand the elimination of all prisons and cash bail. They want to destroy the Constitution along with what remains of limited government, the separation of powers, and the system of checks and balances. They mean to rule America through a dictatorship.

BLM and Antifa inflame popular passion by making the unsubstantiated claim that white police routinely shoot and kill black people. In 2019, scholars published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviewing data from 2015 to discern the extent to which white police were more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white police. The sponsors of the study concluded: We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers. In short, while there are isolated instances of police brutality, and even individual instances of racism in policing, there is no foundation to the BLM charge that white officers are more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers or that racism is common in policing. Police shootings, regardless of the race of the officer, occur in up to 95% of the cases in instances where the party shot by the police was attacking police or other civilians. Among those engaged in the attacks against the police or other civilians, 90% were armed.⁶ These statistics thus support the conclusion that BLM claims of black shootings are exaggerated. The greater BLM claim, that all whites are racists is fictive and itself a discriminatory claim that demeans the overwhelming number of whites who do not judge others based on skin tone. In this way, BLM departs from the legacy of civil rights activists in America of the Jim Crow Era at least through the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Moreover, BLM and Antifa leaders reject the ideology of civil rights movement leaders. The civil rights leaders were believers, mainly Christians and Jews, who staunchly opposed violence and embraced non-violent protest as the means to overcome racial inequality in America. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in his April 16, 1963 letter from Birmingham jail, those who seek change through violence have chosen a corrupt means that taints the very ends they seek: Injustice does not beget justice. Or, as Dr. King more eloquently put it: . . . the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. And again, in his August 28, 1963, I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial: In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. He consistently preached nonviolence.

The civil rights leaders did not destroy historic monuments; they spoke in front of them. They did not shout down those who opposed their cause, they debated them in a civil manner. They did not riot in the streets, they peacefully protested. They did not murder, rape, loot, vandalize, and commit arson; they set an example of dignity, self-restraint, and just purpose. They suffered much physical abuse, incarceration, and vilification for their convictions but they never sought to destroy the people and the institutions that vexed them; rather, they sought to persuade an American white majority to see the hypocrisy inherent in actions and laws that treated the races differently, and they succeeded magnificently. Rather than murder, pillage, rape, and destroy the civilization surrounding them, they understood that such destruction would magnify the horror and oppression they sought to eliminate. They proved the righteousness of their cause by powerful examples of civility, nonviolent insistence on reform, and peaceable assembly. They spoke, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, to the better angels of our nature, presuming all people, regardless of race, fundamentally just, even if momentarily misled into bigotry. They thus sought to expose the injustices of bigotry itself, of the injustice imposed on a just people, not adopting a new form of bigotry to combat the old. They had faith in mankind, in free choice, and in the power of persuasion. They believed in the superiority of their message and understood that it would only take lasting root if those receiving it were persuaded. They knew well, as the Antifa and BLM Marxists do not, that forcing an ideology on a people was impossible.

They did not attack those who did not speak in favor of their cause or destroy institutions run by political opponents; they instead made paramount to every person of fair mind the inevitable necessity in a nation born of freedom to grant freedom to those still disenfranchised. They did not expect society at large to bear the immediate costs and burdens of their demands. They bore those costs and burdens themselves in a Christ-like manner, thereby revealing to the majority that the minority that suffered was possessed of human dignity and a completely understandable desire for justice. It was thus that Dr. King persuaded white Americans to sympathize with his cause, to understand that discrimination was beneath the greatness of America, beneath the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and could not be tolerated. Dr. King won the argument: the minds of the majority changed and then the law changed.

Dr. King’s quest was not to overthrow the Constitution and the government, which held out the promise of freedom; it was to extend that promise to all, regardless of race. Dr. King believed in the Declaration of Independence, understanding that the generation alive during its promulgation did not extend its promise of liberty to all but also understanding that the Declaration’s promise was true and could only be fulfilled when the blessings of liberty reached all. He sought equal justice under the Constitution and protection for the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all people. As Dr. King put it: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. He did not condemn unalienable rights because they had originally been legally recognized in another race. Rather, he explained the hypocrisy of limiting those rights to some of God’s children, when because they are God-given, and in accord with Christ’s doctrine, they necessarily applied to all. He revered the Declaration and the Constitution, stating in his I Have a Dream speech: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Dr. King and the non-violent civil rights activists who joined him were thus adherents of the Lockean philosophy that underlies the Constitution, not the Hegelian and Marxist philosophy used to justify state enslavement of all America, i.e., to justify socialism and communism. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other non-violent civil rights leaders, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King III, Alveda King, John Lewis, Reverend James E. Orange, Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta, Dorothy Height, Diane Nash, Daisy Bates, Julian Bond, James Farmer, and Ralph Abernathy, among others, each believed fervently in the promise of the Declaration of Independence and favored fulfillment of that promise through the creation of a color-blind society in which people would be judged, as Dr. King famously said, not based on the color of their skin but on the content of their characters.

It was in appreciation for that great legacy of peaceful civil rights struggle to extend the promise of the Declaration of Independence to all Americans that I accepted an invitation from the late Reverend James E. Orange, a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak at the 21st Annual Martin Luther King Jr. March and Rally Celebration on January 16, 2000, in Atlanta. There, in front of the King Center and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, I spoke for a few minutes to an audience filling several city blocks. I was honored on a more solemn occasion, on February 8, 2006, when my wife Sheryl and I were invited to attend the funeral service for, and burial of, Coretta Scott King, driving to and from the event in the number one bus of the King family itself. On those occasions, the non-violent teachings of Dr. King filled my mind and were honored as people of all races, united in love of God, of country, and of the Declaration and the Constitution, reflected on the achievements of the great non-violent leaders of the civil rights movement. Their views and deeds in support of the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and freedom for all stand in stark contrast to the Marxist BLM organization and Antifa activists who are not advocates of liberty. To them, race is an excuse for Marxism, which is enslavement.

The Marxist BLM and Antifa rioters together with those who support their cause of violent overthrow, including leading figures in the Democratic party, condemn the Declaration, the Constitution, and all American institutions and, thus, oppose the philosophy of freedom that drove the Civil Rights movement. The Marxists receive either express or tacit support from mayors like Bill De Blasio of New York; Jenny Durkan of Seattle, Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, and Ted Wheeler of Portland, among others; members of city councils in Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland, among others; governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, Kate Brown of Oregon, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Jay Inslee of Washington; members of Congress like avowed socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib; and United States Senators like Kamala Harris (now Vice President), Charles Schumer, Edward Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, and Bernie Sanders (another avowed socialist). BLM and Antifa’s violent actions are trivialized or left unopposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who said that if socialist Bernie Sanders were the Democratic nominee she would support him and indicated that the toppling of statues across the nation was a trivial matter (People will do what they do)); the House Judiciary Com- mittee Chairman Jerry Nadler; House Financial Services Committee Chairman Maxine Waters; Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer; and several other United States Senators and Congressmen, including Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Eric Swalwell. Collectively these politicians by overt statements in support of the revolutionaries, expressions of sympathy for them, or silence in the face of violence and destruction have advanced the Marxist movement to overthrow United States governments.

Violence, the defenestration of the police, and the toppling of governments are actions rejected by most Americans. Those criminal acts are favored by a tiny fraction of the population. The failure of the government to interdict those actions and arrest the perpetrators has led isolated instances to become chronic national phenomena, threatening the safety, liberty, and property of every American.

As one would expect, most Americans regardless of race oppose defunding the police, violent overthrow of United States governments, destruction of property (including statues, private businesses, and homes), and assaults, rapes, and murders of citizens. A Gallup poll from June and July 2020 revealed that 81% of black Americans want the same amount of, or more, policing in their neighborhoods (with 61% wanting the same amount and 20% wanting more). In those parts of urban America where low-income earners of varying races and ethnicities reside, they are now suffering from an extraordinary rise in murders, assaults and rapes, a rise that corresponds directly with the decrease in policing mandated by those cities’ governments whose leaders pander to the BLM organization and Antifa. Urban populations, particularly in the areas hardest hit by crime, overwhelmingly support the police and understand that lives depend on a reliable police presence.

The violence has become the very end sought by the rioters with the originally claimed basis for protest, an end to police abuse of blacks, no longer a primary justification for the violence that has ensued. At first befuddled, Americans are increasingly realizing that the racial injustice said to justify protest does not justify the destruction of monuments, federal buildings, churches, and private property together with assaults against the police and innocent citizens. Those acts of violence and destruction have nothing at all to do with justice, create new injustices, and destroy the basic foundations of our society. Violent crime is the very soul of injustice. It is a repeat of, not a reversal of, the wrongs perpetrated against those who have suffered from instances of police brutality motivated by racism. The BLM organization and Antifa do not want reform, they want overthrow--from the toppling of monuments to the looting and burning of private property to the ultimate toppling of governments federal, state, and local.

That lesson is taught well by several examples of political patronizing that have backfired on those who either fundamentally misunderstood or naively sympathized with the rioters. The saga of Portland Mayor and Police Chief Ted Wheeler is illustrative. After weeks of professing sympathy for what he misperceived to be the aims of BLM and Antifa rioters (those who nightly endeavored to burn and gut the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse), Wheeler flattered himself with the notion that he would be warmly greeted by the rioters. He was convinced the rioters wanted what he wanted: eliminating the federal presence in Portland, defunding the police, ending cash bail, and replacing capitalism with socialism. The rioters, however, weren’t wielding rocks, golf balls, ball bearings, bricks, bottles of urine, bottles of bleach, baseball bats, sledgehammers, Molotov cocktails,boards embedded with nails, brass knuckles, lasers, commercial fireworks, and improvised explosive devices because they wanted reform. No, people destroy buildings where law and order are dispensed, attack police, and try to injure or kill agents defending those buildings because they want an end to law and order. Wheeler presumed himself an alter ego of the mob and one of their favorites, and he presumed they, like he, wanted an end to the federal presence in Portland, not an end to all government, including his own.

With five armed guards surrounding him (a right to self-defense he wants to deny all other citizens), Wheeler ultimately placed himself in a prime spot adjacent to the fence surrounding the federal courthouse. From there he intended to give an anti-federal speech to what he presumed to be a supportive crowd, believing it would boost his standing among them. Poking his head above the crowd, he tried to be heard. The rioters took notice, quickly discerned who he was, and made clear that they did not want to listen. They pressed forward and drowned out Wheeler’s every word with loud shouts of condemnation and demands that he resign. Initially unperturbed, Wheeler pressed on, thinking if the crowd could just see who he was, they would listen to his message. Nonplused, the crowd pitched water bottles at him and other projectiles, aiming for his head. They swore at Wheeler, screamed at him to shut up, drowned out his feeble voice with their multiple and loud taunts and jeers, pressing him and his bodyguards against the fence.

With the rioting intensifying, federal agents then fired tear gas, and Wheeler came within the gas cloud. He choked as his armed entourage then whisked him away to the confines of the nearby County Justice Center. The rioters followed on his heels, demanding that Wheeler get out of the area and out of elective office. When he retreated within the Center, they attacked the Center, pitching projectiles at it and condemning Wheeler. In the Center, Wheeler gave up his quest for mob stardom, leaving in a fast-moving car. Although most would understand from these circumstances that the mob despised Wheeler, the Portland government and police, and the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security (in short, all existing authority), Wheeler, even after his public humiliation, operated on the